Part of Microsoft Accelerator's batch 3 of startups, DefinedCrowd is filling a niche in the big data and machine learning community, providing near-real-time feeds of rich language data, checked by actual well-informed humans all over the world. The need comes from the Catch-22 that often arrests deep data analysis, in that you have to understand the data to analyze it, but you must analyze it to understand it. The vast landscape of the spoken and written word and its big data counterpart in natural language processing is especially troublesome in this way. "In the artificial intelligence space, to develop virtual assistants like Cortana, or Apple's Siri and things like that, you need large amounts of voice recordings, you need transcriptions of those voices, you need intents and empathy labeling of those voices," said Daniela Braga, co-founder and chief scientist, in an interview with TechCrunch. "The crowd input provides the extra refinement of the data that basically no machine can do."

Amazon's assistant Alexa will make its way to the Pebble Core. Just last week the Kickstarter smartwatch company Pebble announced a revamp to its entire product line. The Pebble 2 and Pebble Time 2 welcomed the Pebble Core: a portable Spotify player with smartphone internals and no screen. The device was meant for music-lovers, of course, but also for tinkerers: Because it runs Android, developing apps for the Core could extend its functionality to allow for some interesting uses. Now, Pebble itself is adding in a feature that makes the Core even more useful: Amazon's Alexa voice assistant will come to the portable media player.

When Siri originally launched on the iPhone a little over four years ago, we postulated that it would be a world-changing event. A personal assistant in our pockets that could handle real-world requests felt like the future. When it launched onto the Apple Watch, it was described as potentially being the quickest and most fun way to interact with the wearable. Then when it came to the Apple TV, it became the fastest way to disseminate the content you want to watch across multiple apps. Siri has found its way onto nearly every hero Apple product today, and yet on every device it feels as though it has its own definitive personality.

On Thursday at the Recode Code Conference in Los Angeles, Tinder CEO Sean Rad announced that the dating app has plans to make its services more inclusive to transgender and gender nonconforming communities. Tinder -- which has been accused of having a transphobia problem -- will be "working with leading LGBTQ experts and organizations, including GLAAD, to help them address these needs and continue revolutionizing the ways by which ALL people, across the globe, connect," according to a statement from Tinder's PR team. One challenge we face at Tinder is making sure our tens of millions of users around the world have the same user experience. No matter who you are, no matter what you're looking for, you should get quality matches through the Tinder experience. There's an important transgender (and gender nonconforming) community on Tinder who haven't had that experience... yet.

The tech industry is obsessed with its hunt for finding the next big thing after the smartphone. Last year, it was wearables, like the Apple Watch and FitBit. Each one of those was supposed to change the the way we interact with technology. And each one of those has failed to deliver so far. There's still a sliver of hope for some of those, I guess.

The tech industry is obsessed with its hunt for finding the next big thing after the smartphone. Last year, it was wearables, like the Apple Watch and FitBit. Each one of those was supposed to change the the way we interact with technology. And each one of those has failed to deliver so far. There's still a sliver of hope for some of those, I guess. We're addicted to our smartphones, and it's going to take something truly groundbreaking to unhook us.

Pebble announced its 3G-enabled Core device just last week, and even though the gadget won't ship until 2017, the company is already adding features. Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant will be available on the wearable exercise accessory, bringing voice controls to the iPod Shuffle-esque device. With the Core, Alexa can still handle tasks like playing music, reading news headlines, shopping on Amazon, ordering food, controlling smart home tech and more. In terms of more Pebble-specific chores, the virtual assistant can read your Pebble Health summary to keep you up to speed on your daily stats.

This could help you in building your first project! Be it a fresher or an experienced professional in data science, doing voluntary projects always adds to one's candidature. My sole reason behind writing this article is to get your started with recommendation systems so that you can build one. If you struggle to get open data, write to me in comments. Recommendation engines are nothing but an automated form of a "shop counter guy". You ask him for a product.

Microsoft first brought the feature to Android users, but now folks on Windows 10 Mobile can also get phone notifications synced to their Windows 10 PCs. The new feature was just added as an addition to Cortana in the latest Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview on the fast ring--build 14356. Cortana can send phone notifications and what Microsoft calls "critical alerts" to your Windows PC with the updated version of Windows 10 Mobile. This includes items that already show up, such as regular text messages and missed call alerts, as well as notifications from other messaging apps (WhatsApp, Line, Telegram, etc.), social media alerts, and other app notifications. Microsoft says it's also working on muting notifications on a per-app basis, but that functionality is not ready yet.

Speaker after speaker here got absolutely giddy talking about software programs that can learn from our behavior, anticipate our next moves, and do things we used to have to endure. Long-time geek Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft called the emergence of AI the realization of all those dreams young science fans had as kids. "This is what it was all leading up to. Machines that are as capable and more capable than human intelligence." Gates' Seattle neighbor, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was just as effusive.